How close is doomsday?

The media presents such a blizzard of conflicting information these days anyone with his or her eyes and ears open has to wonder about whom to believe.

This week I happened to catch the movie "2012,'' the premise of which is the world is doomed because of a confluence of cosmic events on the winter solstice in three years. Buttressing this doomsday scenario is the ancient Mayan calendar, which shows time running out on that date, and a 50-year-old theory about how the earth's crust could become displaced.

This gives the moviemakers an excuse to use all sorts of neat special effects to show Los Angeles falling into the Pacific Ocean, a tsunami drowning the Himalayas, an aircraft carrier crashing into the White House and all sorts of other fun scenes. As one review said, people do love seeing things get blown up.

Yet earlier in the week The NY Times said, essentially, not to worry. The world may end "soon,'' a story in the paper's weekly Science section said, but "soon'' in a geologic sense could mean tens of millions of years, so there's no reason to stop buying unripe bananas quite yet. There's no particular threat looming in 2012, the story said.

The Times was in part quoting NASA, which has actually been getting mail from people scared by the movie and felt it necessary to respond.

Scaring the heck out of people is of course a time-tested way to make money, and most people seem able to just shrug off the implications, of any, if fantastic movies like this.

Nevertheless, it is sobering to realize that many more people will see the movie, which will probably make a profit of 10s or 100s of millions, than will see story in The Times, which is struggling to stay in the black. And energy wasted worrying out such a thing detracts from more realistic threats, like global warming or the demise of newspapers.